Is the interview going well?

By Ramit Sethi

We are terrible at interviewing. We walk into the interview room without preparing. We spend time worrying about "trick questions" and about what shirt we should wear, instead of the things that really matter. Worst of all, we believe an interview is intended for us to simply answer the questions that the interviewer gives us.

I say this as someone who's sat on both sides of the table: as a candidate, interviewing against some of the world's toughest companies (like Google and a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund), and as a hiring manager.

Yet once you can master the interview process, you can secure job offers against other candidates who have many years more experience than you. In today's economy, knowing how to interview is a killer skill.

That starts with knowing what to avoid doing in a job interview, or what I call "5 Interview Killers."

1. "I just sort of... and then... and like... and uh... yeah."

If you ramble, you lose.

Think back to when you last met someone

Darden, Wharton, and Stanford are among top-rate business schools offering online courses for free

Has back-to-school season got you thinking that having some business education under your belt might help you grow your company? Join the club.

Since it was announced August 7, more than 12,000 people have already registered for a free online course being offered in January by University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business through Coursera.

"Grow To Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Business" will be taught by Darden professor Edward Hess, author of several books on entrepreneurship. The five-week course promises lessons that will help you scale your business successfully as well as better manage your life. Hess' four Ps—planning, prioritization, process, and pace—and his "gas pedal approach to growth" apply equally to growing your business and yourself, he says.

"Growth is a zigzag, detour, making mistakes, up and down process," Hess says in an engaging video introduction to the course. "Too much growth too fast not properly managed can destroy your business. This

The country is slowly gearing up for the election season ahead and small business owners now have a clearer picture of the choices ahead of them now that Paul Ryan has been picked as Mitt Romney's running mate. We took an extensive look at the elections this week, including the results of a big survey we fielded with small business owners that basically showed that Romney is favored by small business owners but not overwhelmingly, that the economy is a big issue for all small business owners, that government roadblocks are seen as a big problem and that the issue of healthcare reform and how it affects small businesses is very divisive. We also took a look at new VP candidate Paul Ryan's attitudes to small business and how his pick affects people's opinions of the race.

In other, non-election news we also provided some feedback from our customer summit for Yahoo! Small Business merchants. One piece was on ten tips for running an online store and the other was general advice about SEO

Targeting Customers

We recently held a small summit and conference for some of our own customers who use the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions product. It's one of the leading ecommerce platforms and a great way to build your own online store - go take a look here.

Across the two days of the summit we heard a great deal of advice about SEO and here is a summary from several of the panels.

How to think about SEO now

The changes that Google has been making in its search algorithms (and similar changes are taking place at Bing) are all designed to enhance the value of results and find more accurate results that are original and really address the search topic. That means that original content that is clearly naturally created is valued more highly - and that certain kinds of content that Google has identified are devalued. What Google is looking for are the following - is the content written by an expert? Does the page provide substantial value? Does it contain original content? Does it provide description and

Shopping Cart Tips
We recently held a small summit and conference for some of our own customers who use the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions product. It's one of the leading ecommerce platforms and a great way to build your own online store - go take a look here.

Across the two days of the summit we heard a great deal of advice about how to build a killer online store and we'll provide a wrap-up and also some SEO tips later in the week. We decided to start with the top ten tips to make the most of your online store that we gleaned from the many speakers at the summit.

• Add a progress indicator for your store's checkout process. This is a specific example of a wider theme - keep your customer or audience informed about what is going on and where they are. If you don't then you risk them getting confused or distracted and abandoning the shopping cart. Make it too difficult or complicated with too little information and you risk losing them to a competitor who is making the process easier for them to understand.

Trust

Now that the Olympics are wrapping up and the return to school for kids and teens is on the horizon, it's time to refocus on some core business basics - and there isn't really anything more basic than sales. We've got a mix of articles this week from our own site and from external sites that highlight some best practices and interesting ideas around sales, marketing, reaching out to customers and also take a look at some new practices and what the US government may have in store for small business owners. There's also a little career advice, how NOT to do PR and why old school marketing can still beat out new fangled methods like social media.

If you haven't taken the plunge yet, hopefully some of these articles give you the impetus to start your own business — and if you do, we have tools to help. Besides our domain name, web hosting and ecommerce products, we also have just added an innovative marketing dashboard that you can try for free even if you don't use our other products.

Only 1 in 10 small businesses use social media for marketing, according to a recent survey.

We reported here earlier this week that only 10 percent of small businesses recently surveyed consider social media to be an effective method of marketing their businesses. More than half of B2C and B2B small businesses admitted to needing help with the tools. It's clear that many small business people remain confused or simply don't have time to figure out how to use Facebook and other social media platforms to win customers.

But advertising on Facebook could be getting simpler, the tech trade publications Inside Facebook and TechCrunch reported yesterday. According to Inside Facebook, the company is "testing a new design for its self-serve ad tool that simplifies ad creation and recommends a combination of ad types that are most likely to achieve an advertiser's objective."

TechCrunch explained that the new approach will "give more guidance to advertisers as they build their campaigns — specifically by helping them find the right mix of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories to achieve

In-person interaction is most effective marketing method, survey says

Despite the plethora of digital marketing methods available—from email, to websites, to online advertising, to social media—the old-fashioned in-person interaction is still the marketing approach that most businesses consider to be the most effective.

The small business marketing and social media company Constant Contact polled more than 1,000 members of its Small Biz Council. Its findings, published yesterday, reflect the responses of 728 business owners—280 B2B (business-to-business) operations, and 448 B2C (business-to-consumer) companies.

From a list of nine marketing-communications-related small business worries, including securing funding, 70 percent of respondents named "how to attract new customers" as their top priority. Cash was their second greatest concern—45 percent of respondents admit to losing sleep to thinking about how to get more of it. (More than half of all respondents, however, said cash flow is no problem right now, and 63 percent of B2B companies are in that